


A Little More Conversation

by shinealightonme



Category: Derkholm Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, Humor, Post-Canon, Siblings, Social Media, Worldbuilding, phone etiquette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 20:25:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17049986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: "Experimentation is a good thing! New developments are wonderful. Just think how boring the world would be if no one tried anything new."





	A Little More Conversation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notwisely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notwisely/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, notwisely! I was utterly taken with your prompt about Callette inventing texting; I hope you enjoy my take on that!

"And this isn't magic at _all_?" Elda stared down in wonder at the six little devices in front of her. They were nearly identical, each with blinking white screens above rows of letters and numbers, except that one of them was rather larger than the others. It was clearly designed for a griffin's talons.

"Wizards," Callette scoffed. "You all think for something to be worth anything it has to be magic."

Elda gasped. "Oh, that's not what I meant!"

Callette headbutted her to say that there weren't any hard feelings.

Elda turned back to the large gizmo -- already she thought of it as _her_ gizmo -- and pushed buttons, with more enthusiasm than precision. It lit up in a most satisfying way and made a cheerful little chime when she sent a message.

"And I can really have them?" she asked Callette.

"You might as well take them off my hands. I need some people to test them out for me." As though she had not heard -- as though everyone at Derkholm had not heard -- how Elda was missing her friends from University.

Maura had tried to reassure her. "You know you can use the pigeons any time," and Elda had explained at length how that wasn't the same as getting to talk to someone properly. "Half the time by the time they get my letter there's something _new_ I want to say and then they're still responding to the old stuff. _And_ it takes so much longer to get a letter to Claudia and Felim than to everyone in Luteria. And you don't get to talk to everyone at once, so I'll tell Claudia about how Erola and Emara played a prank on Lukin and not realize that she didn't know they'd settled their feud with each other already -- "

That was the point at which Callette had left the conversation. Derkholm was full of audiences better suited to sympathy, like Maura, or Old George, or the compost heap behind the orange grove. Callette couldn't stand long stories with names of people she didn't know or care about, but she did have her own particular way of being a sister, so a month into Elda's holiday from the University, Callette emerged from her gothic den with six gizmos like no one had ever seen before.

"And it'll really work all the way out to the Emirates?"

Callette's tail swished. "Haven't tested them at more than twenty miles," she admitted. "But it should work. Tell me if they have any problems. If they do work I might make some more."

"I want to try! I want to try!" Flo grabbed one of the gizmos and half-ran, half fluttered around the side of the house.

A moment later the gizmo in front of Elda lit up with the word: _hi!_

Elda grinned and tapped back at the letters on her until her own response showed up: _hi!_

The screen lit up again: _hi!_

Elda responded immediately: _hi!_

Kit, meanwhile, was observing this sororal communication with an expression of deep distrust. "Are you sure those are a good idea?" he asked Callette.

"What harm could they do?" she retorted. "They're just like pigeons but faster."

"It's the faster part that worries me."

"It's at least better than Mum making Blade translocate all over the continent because she wants to know who's going to be home for dinner."

"Blade's just one person."

Callette did not argue the point. She let her body language do it for her.

"Oh, Kit, you sound like the old wizards at the university. The new old wizards, not the old old wizards." Kit and Callette followed this clarification, such as it was, with the help of long years of experience with Elda. "Experimentation is a good thing! New developments are wonderful. Just think how boring the world would be if no one tried anything new."

She took off, head held high, to collect the last gizmo from Flo, and left behind a brother who was rather less sure than ever for having received these reassurances.

...

_What is everyone doing right now?_

_Reading_

_Reading what?_

_Felim?_

_I guess Felim went back to reading_

_Oh, well, what's everyone else doing?_

_Nothing, really_  
_Waiting for Titus to get out of a meeting_  
_We're supposed to watch for comets later if the general's ever done talking_

 _Rulers are the same everywhere_  
_Except here in Luteria it's Ruskin who keeps my father busy all day instead of the other way around_

_So we're all just sitting around bored looking at our gizmos?_

_I think perhaps this swiftness in communication was not required after all_

_FELIM, DON'T BE MEAN!_

_Wait, I missed something_  
_Why is Elda shouting? We can shout on these things?_

 _You just had to show him that, didn't you_  
_Like Ruskin's voice wasn't loud enough in person_

_THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH MY VOICE_

...

Callette was a confident inventor, but she was also a realistic inventor. She did not expect other people to recognize her genius as quickly as she did.

Even the most wild optimist, though, would have been caught off guard by the demand for the new gizmos.

First Princess Isodel wanted one, so that she could talk to her brother now that she was off in the distant empire. And then Ruskin wanted one for his cousin Rooska, so that he could keep up with the news from the Central Peaks fastness. And the very next day, a pigeon arrived, with a stately gold-embossed letter commissioning one for each of the Emir's sons.

"It'll be another hundred, then." She wondered if she could get the materials fast enough. Pity that the Central Peaks were so distant. It would have been pleasantly efficient to take the materials as an advance on the gizmos.

Blade looked alarmed. "The Emir doesn't have _that_ many sons." He did not sound sure of himself.

"No, but they'll order more when they realize that the only people they can talk to are each other."

"Gods forbid anyone have to talk to their brothers," Blade said. 

...

_ugh_  
_you know I'm looking forward to joining your family Lukin but someone needs to tell your father to keep his royal addresses shorter_

_you should have heard the speech he gave at our wedding_

_QUEEN IRIDA?_  
_I am so sorry_  
_wait why are you looking at Lukin's gizmo_

 _it's a well-kept secret of the royal family_  
_the crown prince excels at sleeping with his eyes open_  
_and even the queen gets bored sometimes_  
_I can think of several council meetings where I would have loved to have one of these_

_I wish I had one when I was in Wermacht's class_

...

Kit had promised to take Elda to lunch the next time he was in town. He would have thought that the prospect of real food, from a real restaurant, would have gotten her charging through the University like a racehorse. Instead he was waiting for her as noon slid away, with nothing better to do but stare at the fountain that had sprung up, overnight and with no discernible plumbing, in the spot where Policant's statue used to be.

It was a nice fountain, though not so nice that it bothered him to see someone had scrawled a series of numbers on it. He only tried to whisk the graffiti away with a spell because he was bored.

The numbers didn't budge.

Kit straightened up in surprise. It wasn't that any of the students could cast a spell he couldn't counter. He could already see how to remove it, now that he knew it was there. He just couldn't see why anyone would go to the trouble, just to write out a number.

"It's because they want to make friends," Elda explained over pasties in town. "They write down their gizmo number so people will chat with them."

Kit felt no more enlightened. If anything, he knew _less_ about the world than he had before going to the University, which was either ironic or appropriate. "They could just talk to the people around them."

"It's more fun on a gizmo! Anyway you know if they put their number out there that they _want_ to chat, and if they're busy they can just respond later, so you don't have to worry about interrupting anyone."

"You don't put your number down in random places, though." He could not quite see how any sister of his could crave so much socializing.

Elda tossed her head in a self-assured manner. "No, I don't need to. I have lots of numbers in my gizmo already."

"But you do send messages to these..." Kit tried to think of a word other than _vandals_ , but the only alternative that presented itself was _hooligans_ and that was worse. "People?"

"Of course! I love chatting."

"You _have_ friends," Kit said. "You could talk to them."

Elda looked at him, with an intense scholarly expression. "I don't think you get it."

Kit all but fled the restaurant after lunch and sought out Blade the first chance he got. "Blade. Help. Blade!"

"Hm?" He looked up from the pile of papers on his desk, with that _miles and centuries away_ expression Kit associated with their father. "Why do you need help?"

"I don't understand the students. The things they do are weird. They don't make sense."

Blade raised an eyebrow. "...and?"

"I...I think I'm getting _old_ ," Kit confessed.

Blade threw his head back and laughed, because that was the sort of help one brother gave another. "I have to tell Don you said that." He lifted off his desk, not a book like Kit had assumed, but a glittering shiny gizmo.

"Not you too!"

...

 _I love these gizmos_  
_I haven't had to shush anyone in days_  
_They all sit there in silence. Not talking_  
_The world has become so beautiful_

 _I really think you need to take a vacation_  
_Being a librarian is doing strange things to your brain_

...

Blade had successfully eeled his way out of being appointed a full-time position at the University, but Querida had him on the hook for enough guest lectures that he felt like he lived in the place. They'd given him an office and everything.

The position had its uses. The textbook that Flury had inherited from his predecessor was so bad that Blade took pity on him. He'd started transcribing large chunks of his own magical education from memory, and with the University resources he didn't have to worry about ink or paper. By the end of the year, he expected to have enough material to bind it together and publish it.

He'd already decided he would give the writing credit to Deucalion, just to annoy Kit.

He nearly ran into Myrna leaving his office. She was looking down at the gizmo in her hand with a martyred expression. Blade thought, privately, that Myrna looked martyred so much of the time that it lost its effect. He'd felt rather the same way about Shona at times.

But he asked all the same, because he wasn't in a rush and he felt a strange and unwelcome sense of obligation from being a junior staff member. "Is something wrong?"

"I just got a message from Querida."

"Is there a problem?"

"I can't tell," Myrna said.

Finn, passing by, came to a stop and walked back to join them. "Aren't Querida's messages the worst?"

"My baby's scribbles are easier to decipher," Myrna said.

"It can't be that bad." Blade craned his neck to see Myrna's gizmo. The screen lit up with a long string of letters and rather a lot more numbers than he expected. Spaces were sprinkled about as though by chance. He didn't count, but he was fairly certain there was only one vowel in the entire message.

"I don't even understand why she has a gizmo," Myrna was complaining to Finn, who was nodding in zealous agreement. "I thought it was -- one of those fads the students get into."

"I expect my sister made one for her, they're close." Blade said this absently. He was still distracted by the screen. That _mgk_ was probably meant to be _magic,_ but what magic and what Myrna was supposed to do about it, he has no idea. "You've got one, you're not a student."

"It makes it easier to check in with my husband about the baby," Myrna explained. "But I write proper words."

Finn's voice took on the strange mix of joy and spite that characterized all of the best gossip. "Querida says that she's too old to waste the time learning how to type better, so it's on us to figure out what she means."

"How does she expect us to do _that_?"

Blade grinned. "Haven't you got a couple of students doing the divination option this year? Ask them to take a run at it."

Myrna did not look amused, though Finn looked like he was and was hiding it.

Blade was still grinning about the quip a day later when he received a message that, from the _-Q_ at the end and the lack of intelligibility, he assumed was from Querida.

He stretched his arms and decided to simplify the problem.

"I'm going to pop over to the Waste," he told Kit. "Querida wants something."

A few minutes later Elda's gizmo lit up and interrupted her in the middle of an obtuse passage on essence shifting.

 _Elda, can you find Kit_  
_Tell him apparently what Querida wanted was to warn everyone to stay away from the Waste_  
_Also I'm in quarantine and I need him to take my lectures for the next_  
_several days_

...

 _itsa full moon tonigh_  
_watchingg me_  
_I almost went to the moon once_  
_didjou know that finn_  
_finnnn_  
_finnnnnnnn_

 _Corkoran_  
_it's three in the morning_  
_put down the wine and go to bed_

...

Blade was still looking a little blue around the edges when he popped in on Callette's workshop. She wasn't worried. Querida had kept her up to date on his quarantine.

Querida made no more effort in crafting her messages to Callette than she did to anyone else, but then, griffins were natural puzzle solvers.

"Is there a way to make it so that Querida can't message my gizmo anymore?" Blade asked. "She can send as many as she wants and I never have to read them?"

"Sure," Callette said. "Hand me your gizmo."

Blade handed it to her without hesitation.

She thought about breaking it, just to remind him to be more wary. It wasn't a lesson you often got to remind someone of, after they'd grown up with six siblings.

But if she broke it, she'd have to replace it, and the workshop was back ordered already. She stuck to her original impulse and swung the hammer down at the gizmo slowly enough that Blade was able to whisk it back away to safety.

"What?" Callette asked, as though she didn't know. "I thought you didn't want to get messages anymore."

"Ideally, I want Kit to get all of the messages that Querida sends me, but he's still refusing to get a gizmo," Blade said. "And he's still laughing at me for catching wyvern pox."

"Tough."

"Here I was hoping that running your own business would teach you to be nicer to people." Blade smiled as he said this. He wanted to take the sting out of it.

The fact was that nothing could take the sting out of having to be an _employer_. There'd been no choice, though. There was simply too much demand for gizmos. If she hadn't hired on a bunch of artificers, she'd either have to spend every waking minute making gizmos or explaining to people that she wasn't going to make gizmos for them so they should leave her alone, and either choice left her no time for her art.

She'd done the only thing there was to do and opened a workshop where she could manage all of the artificers building the gizmos -- which in actual fact meant that Don managed the artificers, because Callette was too grumpy to deal with her employees. And this in turn meant that the smartest and least flighty of Don's friends managed the artificers, because Don got bored when he stayed in the workshop too long and was prone to distracting the workers.

"You know, I'm starting to I miss pigeons," Blade said. "The old, dumb ones. You could always pretend one had gotten lost and they you wouldn't have to respond to it."

"Spoken like a lazy wizard," Callette told him. "You're getting as bad as Kit."

"I think Kit might be right about these gizmos," Blade admitted.

Callette turned up her nose. There wasn't any time for those kinds of doubts. Shona had asked her about making gizmos that could send sheet music. That in itself wouldn't be a challenge, but it made Callette wonder, why stop there? If she could figure out a way to send an image through a gizmo, it would make it a lot simpler working on commissions.

...

 _[picture]_  
_how is it that the university has more money than ever and the food is still atrocious_

 _That was supposed to be FOOD?_  
_I thought you'd crashed a Healer's workshop on festering wounds_

...

Kings have spies, advisers, explorers, informants; Derk had his daughter Elda, and he would have put her up against any ruler's information network on any day of the week. There was no one better for telling you anything you wanted to know about the goings-on at the University, and many things you didn't want to know, besides.

After two long years on the University Governing Board, he appreciated taking some time out of his day to sit in the shade and let someone else do all of the talking, and most of the listening, too.

"...sending each other messages the whole time, right in the front row of the lecture, too, so Policant stopped right in the middle of his sentence and said, if they like talking with their gizmos so much then they don't need their voices."

"Ah, the old removing the voice trick." In his youth Dirk had, like every other student, loathed and feared that punishment. He'd considered it another example of the University's rigidity and cruelty toward the minds it was supposed to be nurturing.

After raising nine children...well, he was starting to see where the old wizards were coming from, but that didn't need to be shared.

"It didn't make any difference _really_ ," Elda continued, "because they were using their gizmos to talk all the time anyway."

Derk still didn't understand the appeal. He was a pigeon man; he was _the_ pigeon man. He would always be a pigeon man. "Wouldn't that be too slow to have an actual conversation?"

"You can type as fast as you talk, once you get used to it," Elda told him. "I can't type as fast as I think, but that's only because I think so fast."

Dirk left shortly after to attend a meeting of the Board. It was something of a relief. He was always proud of his children, of course, but sometimes it was a complicated sort of pride. Twisted up in shades of confusion and fear.

In any case, he was going to have to tell Policant that the disciplinary measures needed to be updated for a new age.

He just maybe wouldn't tell _Elda_ that he was the one to suggest that infractions now cost a student their gizmo instead of their voice. He didn't want his own children to think that he was a tyrant.

...

_I'm locked out, can someone let me in?_

_no, sorry_

_I'm already in bed_

_sure, I'm on my way_

_Oh, I was going_

_wait, how many people are on this thread_

_who texted THE ENTIRE SCHOOL just to get a door open?_

_Hi, University!_

_Does anyone remember the dragon king after Bellerophontes_  
_I'm in the middle of an essay_

_You could GO TO THE LIBARY_

_It's cold and I don't want to get locked out_

_[picture]_

_UGH_

_that was uncalled for_

_Please stop messaging this thread. I can't get through to any of my real conversations_

_this is hilarious_  
_hiiiiii_

 _While I have you all here_  
_who thinks that Wizard Blade is handsome?_

_I do_

_yes_

_everyone does_

_right??_

_STOP MESSAGING THIS THREAD but yeah, seriously, Blade's handsome_

_Everyone! That's my brother you're talking about!_

_...they're not wrong_

_Claudia! I trusted you! You're supposed to be on my side!_

_EVERYONE. STOP. MESSAGING. THIS. THREAD._

_sorry, Chancellor_

...

Kit walked through the courtyard like he was trying to make a point. Callette made a point of ignoring him. He was probably just bored; there was no one else at Derkholm.

Well, it wasn't Callette's job to entertain him when she'd finally gotten time for painting. She wasn't going to give that up just because her brother was bored.

A gizmo chimed.

Kit cocked his head and made a face of innocent curiosity: _what could that be?_

Callette distrusted that expression. Kit still refused to get a gizmo of his own, which mean that the chime was for her, and there was no reason for Kit to care about it.

There was another chime.

Kit wasn't as clever as he thought he was. Whatever he was up to, Callette might as well get it over with and go back to her painting.

She picked up her gizmo.

 _Hi, Callette, it's Mum!_  
_I've finally got one of your clever gizmos! Kit gave it to me. I have to say it's wonderful!_  
_Not that we expect any less from you_

These messages were immediately followed by a picture of Maura and Derk beaming proudly and off-centered at her from miles away.

"You gave our parents a gizmo?" Callette squawked. Her crest rose up as the reality of the situation sunk in. "You gave them _my number_?"

"I told you to be careful with those," Kit said, smug and sanctimonious. "But you were so sure nothing could go wrong -- "

Callette pounced. She was fast, but Kit hadn't been caught by anyone he didn't want to get caught by since he was thirteen. He was already up in the air by the time Callette landed.

"What's the problem?" Kit asked. "It's just the same as them sending you a pigeon, but faster -- "

Callette took one swipe at him, for form's sake, and slunk off to her den. Maybe it was time to work on that redirection idea that Blade had. She could get it so people could redirect messages, and then she would force Kit to get a gizmo, and then she would make every unwanted message on the continent show up on it so that he had to read it.

It wouldn't be that hard. She was much more clever than a wizard, any day.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this fic you can [reblog it on tumblr](http://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/181616909610/a-little-more-conversation-shinealightonme).


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